My hometown just declared bankruptcy. No, not the town I was born in, and not the place I have lived most of my adult life, but...
Fifty years ago I graduated from high school on the other side of town from where Dolores Huerta had a decade earlier. My high school class...
“More deeply still, nonviolence is a spiritual challenge of epic proportions. It calls upon the soul’s authentic longing for heroism, for risking one’s life for an...
A few weeks back I stood at the corner of 65th and Normandie, in South Los Angeles, remembering what used to be there. An old church,...
Wikimedia If absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance makes reality look rosier. From a long way off Santa Monica appears like a liberal’s fantasy of...
It was a Wednesday night and my son was watching the news on TV in his room while I fixed dinner. “Dad,” he called from the...
Walking back from the SEIU-SOULA* demonstration for immigrant rights at the downtown Federal Courthouse, I am wearing my clerical collar and carrying a CLUE-LA picket sign...
We drove north out of Santa Fe, through Espanola and past Abiquiu, the village where the artist Georgia O’Keefe lived, until we reached a narrow road...
Americans may be almost evenly divided about why a few people get so rich. But when it comes to why people are poor, there’s a general...
We are the 99 percent. Well, yes we are, but not everyone among us thinks so. Lots of people think they are part of the 1...
Not long after the Los Angeles social upheaval of 1992, Mayor Tom Bradley tapped Warren Christopher, former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, and a long-time...
Even before Santa Monica became infamous for the atheists taking over most of the holiday kiosks at Palisades Park, I thought the season was bigger than...
T’is the season of the full mailbox. Every day when I pick up our mail, the box is stuffed with requests for donations. My wife Susan...
I don’t believe in empires. They don’t turn out well. They may last for a while – even a long while – but ultimately they collapse,...
People in our apartment building don’t have to guess the shape of my and my wife’s politics. A weathered NO WAR sign stands in front of...
Confession time: I went to Arizona. Mea Culpa. I know I signed a pledge that I wouldn’t go there because of their anti-immigration laws, but then...
Things are seldom what they seem. Sometimes the distance between what we think we see and what is actually there is the result of personal prejudices....